Sunday, 6 March 2016

Loads of candidates have been in the last days of the 2016 General Election campaign using sponsored pages ads on facebook, Im getting ads from people who are running in Mayo and North Kildare and to the Seanad because Im apparently interested in Kerry based candidates even though I live in Dublin.

I saved most of the ads I saw and the "Why am I seeing this Ad" infowindow which tells you the general categories you were targeted under. Folder of screenshots of the facebook sponsored posts/pages/ads.

I saw the Socialist and Democrats European Party doing ads for anyone interesed in Labour In Ireland (as I once was) and I think I saw European Peoples Party twitter ads for Fine Gael.

Sinn Fein did sponorsed ads for their last days videos (SF on health ad) Fine Gael did an video (that I presumed was brought to people via ads) in the last few days with particular use of the American style black and white and image pans.

The Facebook ads solution in Ireland aren't that sophisticated in terms of geographic targeting due to the previous lack of a country wide postcode (although we now have Eircode) and voter file databases. I had a look at my options. Its a circle you can put miles diameters on, or name a place, and you add 3 interests or an age ranges, or use customer list or website traffic or app activity and also target based on device (id).

I kept seeing ads for Kevin Humphries who is running in Dublin Bay South for Labour even though I live well into Dublin Bay North but it was actually because I visited his website about a month ago here's the ad and you can see him using the Facebook pixel Home - Kevin Humphreys which is like the clear pixels trackers that load in email newsletters to tell them you read it.

I had adblocker on and I turned it off to subject myself to the political ads. Canvassing is still king we're barely scratched the surface compared to the US (or the UK) in terms of micro-targeting but what else have people seen?

I read on here that Fine Gael were sending out letters about Ross voting against the SCC (Ross said he voted against the motion to renew the legislation because it was being guillotined) and Shatter has been tweeting about that for the last week, so make up your own minds about who is behind it.

Independent councillor and general election candidate David McGuinness said that some of the Tánaiste’s constituents received the letters – but only those who are on social welfare or are registered landlords.

However, the Department insisted that the constituents’ information was drawn from publicly available resources and that no internal information from its own database was used.

and explained what Joan Burton staff was doing was to get a list of rental addresses from the PRTB website and cross reference that with the electoral register

I donwloaded Dublin 7 and they are 7000 adresses, not very precisely targeted, but despite impressions of wasteful use, they need to use their Oireachtas envelopes carefully and this would narrow the address list somewhat.

Not sure Dave McGuinness is fully aware of these public lists and came up with other problems with it, even after the Department and others explained what was done, he still wasn't satisfied, questioning it on his facebook page,

Cllr David McGuinness Ind December 16, 2015
Homeowners details on PRTB website accessed, then cross checked with the names on the electoral register and then Joan Burton decides to write to these people in D15 randomly using prepaid Dáil envelopes but who did the work? Was it civil servants doing constituency work for the upcoming election. Serious questions remain and I believe a lot of people will be angry at their information being used like this